Published 5:30 am, Friday, September 8, 2006

With national security and the war on terror again in the spotlight as the midterm congressional elections near, intense political scrutiny is focused on the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, set to air Monday on the event's fifth anniversary.

Democrats and some experts on terrorism say a key scene in which members of President Bill Clinton's administration refuse to approve a CIA recommendation to kill or capture al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden never happened. The show's narrative, according to a review by Editor and Publisher, presents the Bush administration largely in a positive light.

A letter expressing Clinton's objections signed by his lawyer stated, "The content of this drama is factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate, and ABC has the duty to fully correct all errors or pull the drama entirely."

Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and former security adviser Samuel R. Berger also wrote protest letters to Robert Iger, president and CEO of Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC. "No such episode ever occurred," Berger wrote, "nor did anything like it."

The New York Times quoted another Clinton official, Richard Clarke, as saying, ''There were no CIA operatives about to snatch bin Laden. It's utterly invented."

A former Bush administration security official, Roger Cressy, described the ABC production as riddled with factual errors both small and large. "What ABC has done here is something straight out of Disney and fantasyland," Cressy told an MSNBC talk show host.

The show's writer and producer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, is no stranger to debates over his mixture of fact and fiction in historical dramas. He wrote the Showtime docudrama "The Day the President was Shot," which depicted the White House in turmoil after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Reagan national security adviser Richard Allen claimed Nowrasteh and executive producer Oliver Stone "have pulled out all the stops, turning history on its head by substituting fantasy and sheer fabrication for what really occurred in the White House."

ABC officials have downplayed concerns over the show's accuracy, explaining it "has composite and representative characters and incidents, and time compressions have been used for dramatic purposes."

However, the network is planning to distribute the miniseries to thousands of high school students via free downloads. The exposure will leave many young people thinking they are seeing fact rather than fiction.

Nowrasteh has a talent for writing fiction, including the pilot episode of the popular spy series La Femme Nikita, and a little-seen movie, Norma Jean, Jack and Me, in which a shipwrecked man washes up on an Caribbean island and discovers President Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe alive and living out their golden years.

It's unfortunate that ABC would trust the depiction of a still painful and politically volatile subject such as 9/11 to a writer best known for fantastical storytelling. The least ABC officials can do is remove segments found to be fictitious before distributing the movie to impressionable schoolchildren and a national audience.